RICH LOWRY: The Refugee Crisis Is Exposing Europe’s Folly.

The scale of the crisis is mind-boggling.

About a million people left Russia after the 1914 revolution. In Syria alone, about 4 million people have fled the country, and another 7 million have been internally displaced.

Refugees and migrants are also coming from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other hopeless places, adding up to potentially tens of millions of migrants.

The locus of the migrants’ hopes, more than anywhere else, is Germany. It is expected to get 800,000 asylum claims just this year.

The government is talking of taking 500,000 migrants annually for the next several years, and Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the crisis “the next great European project.” The reaction of the rest of Europe should be, no thanks.

What Germany is proposing is undertaking a vast social and demographic experiment, with the rapid, bulk importation of Muslim immigrants into a country with an aging population.

Other European countries could be forgiven for not being so adventurous. The experience of the French banlieues, home to generations of unassimilated Muslim immigrants, hasn’t been a happy one.

This is what happens when a country is governed by elites who don’t feel any special love for the country they govern.